Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk has instructed the company’s vehicle delivery staff to provide FSD Beta test drives to new customers before handing the cars over to them.
A leaked official email from Elon Musk to Tesla employees surfaced on his social media platform X (Twitter) yesterday by one of the retail investors and Musk’s friend Whole Mars Catalog (Omar).
Offering free installations and test drives of the latest version of FSD Beta is a genius idea by Elon Musk. However, this will result in delays in vehicle deliveries and can create a backlog of orders due to the increased time needed to hand over vehicles to customers.
The subject of Elon Musk’s leaked email is “FSD V12.3.1” and he sent this email to the entire company (screenshot below). Such Elon Musk emails mean that whatever has been mandated is effective immediately.
“Going forward, it is mandatory in North America to install and activate FSD V12.3.1 and take customers on a short test ride before handing over the car,” Musk stated in the email.
Tesla released version 12.3 of FSD Beta self-driving software last week. Although it received good reviews from the beta testers, there were some notable flaws in it. However, Tesla acted quickly and delivered the next sub-version 12.3.1 in the next few days to fix the known issues.
FSD Beta v12.3.1 (2023.44.30.30) is getting even better reviews from the beta testers. This confidence has led Elon Musk to decide to have it pre-installed on every new vehicle. However, to make it clear, this installation will only be for the test ride and it will be deactivated by Tesla until the owner buys the $12,000 Autopilot Full Self-Driving package.
“Almost no one actually realizes how well (supervised) FSD actually works,” Musk wrote in his email.
As we previously noted, Elon Musk realizes that this extra bit of task will increase the workload for the Tesla delivery staff at stores across North America. “I know this will slow down the delivery process, but it is nonetheless a hard requirement,” he instructed further.
This is the end of Q1 2024, and Tesla usually has a rush of deliveries during this period. The requirement to install and demo test drive FSD Beta v12.3.1 might result in some vehicle deliveries falling into the next quarter. But Elon Musk thinks this is worth it.
More interestingly, Elon Musk also announced that all capable vehicles in the United States will be enabled for a free one-month trial of Full Self-Driving Beta. The first version downloaded on these cars will be FSD Beta v12.3.1. During the trial period, users might receive new updates.
Tesla vehicles equipped with Hardware 3 (HW3) and the new Hardware 4 (HW4) computers and cameras are going to get the free FSD Beta trial. However, Tesla Cybertruck will not be getting the update. It’s hardware capable but because of its different shape, size, and driving dynamics, Tesla is not offering Full Self-Driving on the Cybertrucks yet.
This is going to expand the FSD Beta circle in the United States to a fairly large audience. Even if 70% of Tesla owners opt to download, install, and test FSD Beta 12.3.1, the user base will grow to hundreds of thousands in the US alone.
Since Elon Musk mentioned the US in his tweet explicitly, we assume that Canada will not be getting the FSD Beta trial for now at least. Canadian Tesla owners will only get the demo drive at the time of delivery.
At the time of this writing, according to data provided by TeslaFi.com, 3,108 vehicles are still on FSD Beta 12.3 (2023.44.30.25) and only 39 vehicles have been upgraded to the latest v12.3.1 (2023.44.30.30) — out of the total pool of 19,831 data contributing vehicles on the platform.
This means that Tesla is still slowly rolling out FSD Beta v12.3.1 despite the release earning rave reviews from the initial batch of beta testers.
Let us know if you would download FSD Beta on your vehicle if given the chance to try it for a month in the comments box below.
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Already own FSD on my 2020 Tesla model Y-Performance and today 12.3 works perfect. Drives like butter all the way to work and parks them home and parks.